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So you’ve heard all about this Canadian myth, eh?

The myth: The two-letter interjection is a unique speech marker, at once charming and indispensable to achieving eloquence as a Canuck.

Eh can be used as a confirmational question — “that’s what you mean, eh?” — and as a narrative device — “I was going to the store, eh, and I met a guy you know” — where it functions as a stopgap and an indicator that there’s more of the story to come. (Taylor Shute illustration)

Dialects are like musical arrangements.

And the one that plays daily across much of English Canada has a particular note that repeats, over and over, to punctuate the spoken symphony.

“Eh.”

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That’s the opinion, anyway, of one Doug McKenzie — elder half of the stubby-bottled-beer-swilling McKenzie brothers tandem, who bickered and belched their way to hoser fame on the old SCTV comedy show back in the 1980s.

Take off, you say?

No, really. Turns out the man beneath Doug’s tasselled toque — St. Catharines’ own Dave Thomas — is well versed on the topic of linguistics.

And he’s thought a lot about the little word he and his partner Rick Moranis — the equally boneheaded Bob McKenzie — forever tagged on Canadians during their improvised “Great White North” skits.

“I don’t know whether (eh) was a linguistic layover from an earlier time, but it was definitely laced into Canadian speech patterns,” Thomas says.

“And so when Rick and I were playing the McKenzie brothers as the quintessential Canadians we slapped that into our parlance.”

Thomas, who now lives in Los Angeles, developed an interest in and ear for dialects at an early age. His father, a philosophy professor, was Welsh and his mother, a church organist and composer, was Scottish.

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“So I had those two dialects to listen to right off,” says Thomas, the holder of an Honorary Doctor of Letters degree from Hamilton’s McMaster University, his alma mater.

After moving as a kid to North Carolina, where his father earned a PhD at Duke University, Thomas also had the southern U.S. drawls and colloquialisms to play with.

“Dialects and speech patterns were always part of what … I tuned into, so picking up on the ‘eh’ thing (for the McKenzie skits) wasn’t a big deal,” he says.

“And we thought if we’re going to do these characters, we’re going to slow down our speech a little, certain words we’re going to over-pronounce and we’re going to tag a lot of sentences with ‘eh.’ ”

It should be noted that the use of “eh” is far from universal in this country.

Its frequency of use varies both by geography and by conversational contexts, says Michael Iannozzi, of the Canadian Language Museum.

For example, studies have shown that fewer than 10 per cent of Toronto residents use the word, where people in northern and rural communities employ it much more often, he says.

But the McKenzies’ usage of the word was organic, Thomas says, and tuned correctly to the “music” of the Canadian speech patterns that he and Moranis — a Toronto native — were familiar with as children.

Rick Moranis, left, and Dave Thomas are shown as the characters Bob and Doug McKenzie in the old SCTV comedy series. They were known to drop a few eh-bombs.

“We both knew the Ottawa Valley dialects and the kind of rural Canadian dialects and the Toronto dialects,” Thomas says. “And the ‘ehs’ were just a natural part of them.”

(There was little natural about another pair of mega-memes the two-minute skits ignited. Thomas says the phrase “take off” was a “seat of the pants” substitute for f--- off, necessitated by network cursing rules. “Hoser,” too, was an entirely improvised insult, he says.)

As closely associated with Canada as the word has become, Thomas insists that “eh” was used frequently in the U.S. back in the 1940s, particularly in gangster and noir films.

“Sooo, a copper, eh?,” he says, falling into Runyonesque diction. “It was laced in all the movies.”

But the subsequent disappearance of “eh” from common U.S. speech is one of the main reasons it has become so closely associated with Canada, says Iannozzi.

“It’s used in other parts of the Commonwealth,” says Iannozzi, whose museum in located on York University’s Glendon College campus.

“But the reason it’s often so associated with Canadians in that Americans don’t use it,” he says.

As with many points of politics and culture, Canadians often define themselves through the things we don’t share with our U.S. neighbour, Iannozzi says.

And — lacking the natural rhythms of Canadian dialect — Americans can almost never get the word right, Thomas says.

An accomplished mimic, Thomas says he learned a lot early on from imitating his Scottish mother.

“The Gaelic language comes from a song and there’s a musical aspect to impersonating a Scot,” he says. “It’s not just brrrs and rolling your R’s.”

“If you listen to it (musically), you can do it. If you just think of it as an E.H. exclamation mark that you tag on to the end of a sentence, you do it incorrectly.”

That it is widely employed in the Canadian brand of English is undoubted, says Iannozzi, also a graduate linguist at London’s Western University.

Indeed, an entire page is devoted to its etymology and meanings in the authoritative Dictionary of Canadianisms on Historical Principles, or DCHP, he says.

“It’s something that’s seen as so Canadian both by Canadians and by lots of other people throughout the world,” Iannozzi says.

And for such a small word, “eh” is extremely versatile, he adds.

It can be used as a confirmational question — “that’s what you mean, eh?” — and as a narrative device — “I was going to the store, eh, and I met a guy you know” — where it functions as a stopgap and an indicator that there’s more of the story to come.

Thomas says the word can also be seen as a linguistic equivalent of the millennial use of “upspeak” when seeking approval in conversations.

“They go up a note (when talking). ‘We wanted to come to TOWWWN? And we were if thinking maybe you could some WITHHH us?’ ” he says as an example.

“They go up at the end of their sentence, seeking approval. There’s a possible analysis of ‘eh’ as a kind of upspeak, looking for approval too — eh?”

Its employment is also guided, subconsciously for the most part, by the type of conversation being engaged in, Iannozzi says.

As a word closely associated with the cloddish McKenzie tosspots, for example, it has uncouth connotations and may be used less frequently in a doctor’s office than on a hockey bench.

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